Manga'esque comic strip/ graphic novel devoted to the adventures of three teenagers, Cary, Gina and Rabby whose dystopic and dysfunctional existence is alleviated via their online exploits in the cyber world of Cloud 109.

Saturday, 10 October 2009

Work in Progress Part 1

Having spent the last three days trying to raise the profile of Cloud 109, juggling paid work deadlines and generally trying to get savvy with the art of blogging, I've now got to catch up with some more pages from the comic itself.

Which brings me to the interesting topic of the creative process itself and which techniques work best for which artists. Everybody evolves their own unique way of creating comics and the arrival of the digital age has created a whole new range of possibilities for artists to get their work ready for reproduction. When considering how best to go about creating the pages for Cloud 109, I looked at a lot of contemporary work, including the now sadly defunct DFC, in my opinion the best new comic the UK has seen for the last quarter of a century. The artists there were using a variety of techniques to produce the necessary level of quality whilst meeting a tight deadline, including eliminating the inking process altogether and just producing tight pencils.

I'd pretty much explored a lot of those techniques before, each with it's own advantages and commensurate disadvantages, but after some thought I decided to create all the artworks for Cloud 109 in Adobe Illustrator, which admittedly can be a bit labour intensive to begin with, but does have the advantage of being easily adaptable to alteration and does have an immediate elegance that was just perfect for the Manga'esque style that I wanted to inject into the strip.

Which brings me to how I actually create these fershlugginer pages in the first place:

So stage 1 I just draw out at about 1/4 A4 very small really a page like this: